The Empresa Municipal de Transportes de Madrid (also known as EMT Madrid) is the company charged with the planning of public urban transport in the city in

Madrid Madrid ( , ) is the capital and most populous city of Spain. The city has almost 3.4 million inhabitants and a metropolitan area population of approximately 6.7 million. It is the second-largest city in the European Union (EU), and ...

Spain , image_flag = Bandera de España.svg , image_coat = Escudo de España (mazonado).svg , national_motto = '' Plus ultra'' (Latin)(English: "Further Beyond") , national_anthem = (English: "Royal March") , ...

. The organization is wholly owned by the

City Council of Madrid The City Council of Madrid ( es, Ayuntamiento de Madrid) is the top-tier administrative and governing body of the Madrid, the capital and biggest city of Spain. The City Council is composed by three bodies; the Mayor who leads the City Council ...

and is a member of the

Consorcio Regional de Transportes de Madrid The Consorcio Regional de Transportes de Madrid (CRTM; literally: ''Regional Consortium of Transportation for Madrid'') is an autonomous body created by Spanish law 5/1985 which is tasked with coordinating the public transport operations across m ...

. Among the services provided by EMT Madrid are urban bus transportation as well as the

BiciMAD BiciMAD is a bicycle sharing system in Madrid, Spain. It is currently provided by the Empresa Municipal de Transportes de Madrid, a public company owned by the City Council of Madrid The City Council of Madrid ( es, Ayuntamiento de Madrid) is th ...

bicycle-sharing system A bicycle-sharing system, bike share program, public bicycle scheme, or public bike share (PBS) scheme, is a shared transport service where bicycles are available for shared use by individuals at low cost. The programmes themselves include bo ...

History

EMT Madrid was established on 12 November 1947 after the dissolution of the Joint Transport Company. Originally a municipal private company, in 1971 it became a joint stock company. It provided trolleybus service until it disappeared in 1966 and tram services until 1972. The current colour of the buses is blue and white. When the company was created in 1947, the buses were also blue, but in a darker shade than the current one, a legacy of the old Sociedad Madrileña de Tranvías. In 1974, taking advantage of the end of the trams two years earlier, the colour was gradually changed to red, culminating in 1986, the year in which all municipal buses were red. And so it was until 1992, when the first sky blue bus arrived, when Gas Natural buses began to enter the company, and these had their characteristic colour to define them from the rest. In the summer of 2008, the change of colour to the current blue began again, with the arrival of new buses and the disappearance of the old ones, with their red colour. The company has also gone through several different logos. It began with a round E inside which were placed an M and a T. And at the end of the 1970s, two red arrows (or yellow arrows on a red background) crossed together to indicate "Ven y Voy" (Come and I'm coming). In 2010 a blue logo appeared, just like the change of colour that was taking place on the buses, with the words EMT above a square with the city's coat of arms and the word "Madrid!". In 2018, with the entire fleet of buses already in blue, the logo was changed again - for the current one - which is a lowercase "e" followed by a white ">" sign on a blue background.

Multimodal public transport

City bus lines

The EMT manages a fleet of 2,076 buses distributed in 213 lines that have an extension of 3,500 kilometers. Currently, it provides the bus service in regular and temporary lines to replace other transports that have suffered an accident or have their service interrupted due to works. As part of EMT's added value there is an open data system for the "Smart City",

CCTV Closed-circuit television (CCTV), also known as video surveillance, is the use of video cameras to transmit a signal to a specific place, on a limited set of monitors. It differs from broadcast television in that the signal is not openly ...

and free

WiFi Wi-Fi () is a family of wireless network protocols, based on the IEEE 802.11 family of standards, which are commonly used for local area networking of devices and Internet access, allowing nearby digital devices to exchange data by radio wa ...

connection both in the most relevant stops and in the whole bus fleet. To reduce the volume of polluting gases emitted by its vehicles through the use of alternative energies such as Compressed Natural Gas,

biodiesel Biodiesel is a form of diesel fuel derived from plants or animals and consisting of long-chain fatty acid esters. It is typically made by chemically reacting lipids such as animal fat ( tallow), soybean oil, or some other vegetable oi ...

, electric traction,

hydrogen Hydrogen is the chemical element with the symbol H and atomic number 1. Hydrogen is the lightest element. At standard conditions hydrogen is a gas of diatomic molecules having the formula . It is colorless, odorless, tasteless, non-to ...

bioethanol Ethanol (abbr. EtOH; also called ethyl alcohol, grain alcohol, drinking alcohol, or simply alcohol) is an organic compound. It is an alcohol with the chemical formula . Its formula can be also written as or (an ethyl group linked to a hyd ...

; intensive renewal of the fleet with conventional

diesel Diesel may refer to: * Diesel engine, an internal combustion engine where ignition is caused by compression * Diesel fuel, a liquid fuel used in diesel engines * Diesel locomotive, a railway locomotive in which the prime mover is a diesel engi ...

buses with strict environmental requirements. The buses in Madrid are the only public transport system available around the clock as the metro network closes down between 02:00 and 06:00 am. The

night buses Night service, sometimes also known as owl service, refers to the public transport services operated during the night hours. These services are operated, mainly using buses but in certain cases using trams (or streetcars), not including int ...

, also known as "''Buhos''" (Owls), operate from 23.45 to 06.00 am. The heavy traffic in Madrid can in some cases make the city buses a fairly slow form of transportation but the city of Madrid has more than 90 km of special bus and taxi lines to help solve this issue. Buses serving the outer areas are run by 33 private companies, coordinated by the ''

''. This network is fundamentally radial.''Estructura Economica de le Ciudad de Madrid''
, ''Ayuntamiento de Madrid'' (Madrid City Council), August 2013

BiciMAD

In May 2016, with the municipalization of the bicycle rental service (until then operated by Bonopark S.L.) by the City Council, the EMT assumed the management of this service. File:Man Castrosua Bendy Bus.jpg, Castrosua bus operating in central Madrid. File:EMT Mercedes Benz Citaro 202.JPG, An EMT Citaro. File:BiciMAD.jpg,

bike-sharing service (operated by EMT Madrid since 2016) File:Madrid desde el teleférico que lleva a la Casa de Campo - panoramio.jpg,

Teleférico de Madrid The ''Teleférico de Madrid'', or Madrid Cable Car, is a gondola lift in the Spanish capital city of Madrid. It is long and links the Parque del Oeste with the Casa de Campo. The line was built by Von Roll Von Roll Holding AG is a Swiss indust ...

(operated by EMT Madrid since 2018)

References

External links

Official site
Transport in Madrid Government of Madrid Companies based in Madrid Transport companies established in 1947 Spanish companies established in 1947 {{Spain-transport-stub